Top 500 Jeanette Winterson Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “What is it that you contain? The Dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia. The expanding universe opening in your gut. Are your twenty-three feet of intestines loaded with stars?”

— Jeanette Winterson

52. “The only selfish life is a timid one.”

— Jeanette Winterson

53. “In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.”

— Jeanette Winterson

54. “I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free.”

— Jeanette Winterson

55. “Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

56. “The Humans is a laugh-and-cry book. Troubling, thrilling, puzzling, believable and impossible. Matt Haig uses words like a tin-opener. We are the tin.”

— Jeanette Winterson

57. “When it is time to get to work, I go away completely and don’t do anything except the work. And that can be 16 hours a day.”

— Jeanette Winterson

58. “I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”

— Jeanette Winterson

59. “We don’t go to Shakespeare to find out about life in Elizabethan England; we go to Shakespeare to find out about ourselves now.”

— Jeanette Winterson

60. “I keep telling this story – different people, different places, different times – but always you, always me, always this story, because a story is a tight rope between two worlds.”

— Jeanette Winterson

61. “In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”

— Jeanette Winterson

62. “I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject.”

— Jeanette Winterson

63. “I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”

— Jeanette Winterson

64. “In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.? Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.”

— Jeanette Winterson

65. “Nothing can be forgotten. Nothing can be lost. The universe itself is one vast memory system. Look back and you will find the beginnings of the world.”

— Jeanette Winterson

66. “What I want does exist if I dare to find it...”

— Jeanette Winterson

67. “You never give away your heart; you lend it from time to time. If it were not so, how could we take it back without asking?”

— Jeanette Winterson

68. “I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

69. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a hero without a cause. People like that just make trouble so that they can solve it.”

— Jeanette Winterson

70. “That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”

— Jeanette Winterson

71. “A curse on this game. How can you stick at a game when the rules keep on changing? I shall call myself Alice and play croquet with the flamingos. In Wonderland everyone cheats and love is Wonderland, isn’t it?”

— Jeanette Winterson

72. “To me, these days will never end. I am always there, in that room with her, or if not I, the imprint of myself – my fossil-love.”

— Jeanette Winterson

73. “You were in my arms for the first time, and you said my name, ‘Tristan.’ I answered you: ‘Isolde.’ Isolde. The world became a word.”

— Jeanette Winterson

74. “I used to think marriage was a plate-glass window just begging for a brick.”

— Jeanette Winterson

75. “I don’t believe in happy endings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

76. “It is not possible to control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing space. It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change.”

— Jeanette Winterson

77. “The journey is not linear, it is always back and forth, denying the calendar, the wrinkles and lines of the body.”

— Jeanette Winterson

78. “I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.”

— Jeanette Winterson

79. “Our broken society is not born out of the triumph of the individual, but out of his effacement. He vanishes, she vanishes, ask them who they are and they will offer you a wallet or a child.”

— Jeanette Winterson

80. “Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.”

— Jeanette Winterson

81. “Christmas is about community, collaboration, celebration. Done right, Christmas can be an antidote to the Me First mentality that has rebranded capitalism as neo-liberalism. The shopping mall isn’t our true home, nor is it a public space, though, as libraries, parks, playgrounds, museums and sports facilities disappear, for many the fake friendliness of the mall is the only public space left, apart from the streets.”

— Jeanette Winterson

82. “Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.”

— Jeanette Winterson

83. “Time is a boomerang, not an arrow.”

— Jeanette Winterson

84. “However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.”

— Jeanette Winterson

85. “I like being on my own better than I like anything else, but I can’t give up love. Maybe it’s the tension between longing and aloneness that I need. My own funicular railway, holding in balance the two things most likely to destroy me.”

— Jeanette Winterson

86. “Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid.”

— Jeanette Winterson

87. “When people looked at him they had the feeling of being shut out. He did not shut them out. He shut himself in.”

— Jeanette Winterson

88. “The fossil record is always there, whether or not you discover it. The brittle ghosts of the past. Memory is not like the surface of the water – either troubled or still. Memory is layered. What you were was another life, but the evidence is somewhere in your rock – your trilobites and ammonites, your struggling life-forms, just when you thought you could stand upright.”

— Jeanette Winterson

89. “I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you.”

— Jeanette Winterson

90. “I have no idea what happens next.”

— Jeanette Winterson

91. “Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It’s all legend, it is all rumor.”

— Jeanette Winterson

92. “The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”

— Jeanette Winterson

93. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? He said.”

— Jeanette Winterson

94. “When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.”

— Jeanette Winterson

95. “We shall all die, and our lives will be irrelevant then.”

— Jeanette Winterson

96. “She was a monster, but she was my monster.”

— Jeanette Winterson

97. “I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”

— Jeanette Winterson

98. “I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.”

— Jeanette Winterson

99. “True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction – don’t believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.”

— Jeanette Winterson

100. “I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

— Jeanette Winterson